The Streets: Breaking out of the Black Box/White Cube in Rotterdam    

Justine Grace

To discover a city through film – and I don’t mean through narratives that nostalgically recount a director’s homeland, or carefully constructed sequences that linger on the back alleys of Berlin or sidewalk cafes of Paris, but rather through what I am terming the cinematic experience of localities – is a precise description of how I felt traversing the various locations of XL: A City Symphony at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in January/February 2011. From optical illusions at an optometrist’s (XL26: Werktank, Statics + Reverse Blinking) to the projection of landscape vistas in a cafe (XL33: Valentin Stefanoff, The World Is Too Much with Us II) and the presentation of experimental film at a fitness club (XL6: The WORM Abnorminal Fitness Club), Edwin Carels’ programme literally exploded into the streets of Rotterdam.

Embracing the possibilities offered by A City Symphony, I made it my mission (only half-seriously at first, but by the last day it had become a quasi-obsession) to see, visit and engage with all forty locations. Although I didn’t quite make it to all of them, I did manage thirty-six; a filmic journey of sorts that not only encouraged me to visit places I would not normally venture (the Sonneveld house or the Maritime Museum, for example), but also offered up a series of recurrent themes, or tendencies, that were reflected throughout the film festival and, more broadly, pointed to a number of trends in contemporary culture.

A chance meeting with Carels at the screening of Michael Hirsch’s 1972 underground classic Voulez-vous coucher avec God? (XL7) led to an interesting discussion about the genesis and execution of the ‘extra-large’ programme which, more than a poetic coincidence, had forty locations to celebrate, and help publicise, the fortieth birthday of the film festival. Working with what Carels termed as ‘an xs budget’, the interdisciplinary programme recuperated an aspect of the festival – the experience and collaboration with artists – that had been lost in previous years. Departing from a broad notion of the cinematic, each of the locations, and their corresponding work, sought to challenge the expectations of the viewer, artist and site. Carels saw his role as a coordinator of the forty sites rather than curator; taking what he called a ‘democratic approach’, he entered into an open dialogue with the various Rotterdam institutions and international artists. In this way, he aimed to put together a diverse series of exhibitions and events through which new possibilities between film, visual culture and viewer engagement could be explored.

In line with this general aesthetic, Carels’ pet project Not Kidding sought to address the limits of innovative cinema and its connection to the past in a space oriented toward a diverse audience. It was a platform for exploring the liberation of being a child; ‘a programme about infancy rather than for infants’, it featured TV dinners (with accompanying films by the likes of Larry Clark and Harmony Korine), workshops on how to scratch a 16mm movie, and avant-garde shadow puppetry. (1) This positioning of the viewer to engage with films and exhibitions from a perspective of childlike abandon, that is, without the preconceptions and critical distance that so often characterises our interaction with art and film, was an underlying trend of the XL programme.

Fairytales and the Enchantment of Childhood

1. The author in conversation with Edwin Carels, 3 February 2011.

2. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan & Co., 1872), p. 7.

One of the emblematic genres of children’s literature is the fairytale – although, originally, as with the tales of the Brothers Grimm, adults were also an intended audience. It is a form of storytelling that speaks to the imagination, characterised by indeterminate time and place, supernaturalistic settings, folkloric characters, a complete abandonment of the laws governing the universe and a dismantling of society’s conventions. Many of the works and films in the festival were underpinned by a fairytale aesthetic but, leaving behind the saccharine adaptations made famous by Walt Disney, they signalled the reprise of a more grown-up spectator and a return to the latent darkness or perversity characteristic of the traditional fairytale. Spectators were offered a banquet of other-worldly environments and dark enchantments, such as in Catherine Breillat’s La belle endormie (Sleeping Beauty, 2010), where a coming-of-age fantasy is set within the labyrinthine dream world of a young princess; the series of short films Fairytales Freak Me Out in the Out of Fashion programme; and the surreal or fantastic tone featured in many of the exhibitions in A City Symphony.

Zach Gold, film still from String Theory, 2010, colour/ b&w video, 11 min, no dialogue.

Fairytales Freak Me Out was a series of nine short films united by their engagement with elements of the fairytale. Ranging from animation to live action, poetic expression to publicity, and short story narrative to abstract expression, it was one of the standout sections of the Out of Fashion programme. Rather than the feel-good hills of Julie Andrews/Maria von Trapp, viewers were presented with tales of dark longing, nostalgia and decadent beauty. Two of the more dynamic films were Zach Gold’s String Theory and the Quay Brothers’ Wonderwood, both of which were products of direct collaboration with the respective fashion houses A. F. Vandevorst and Comme des Garçons. In String Theory, a sexually charged atmosphere forms the setting for an adolescent girl who moves in and out of conscious reality. Like La belle endormie, the dream sequences seamlessly progress from one to the next to create a hallucinatory narrative in which the ‘everydayness’ of props such as lamps, crockery and feminine trinkets is turned into something of a more sinister nature. In the Quay Brothers short, the olfactory traits — the woody notes — of Commes des Garçons’ new perfume Wonderwood are translated into visual signs: acorns, pine needles, parquetry, brightly coloured woodpeckers and a wooden puppet. The animated forest iconography is set within the confines of an inky black environment, reminiscent of the foreboding woods found in childhood classics such as Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel.

The absurd and fantastic elements that form an essential component of fairytales permeated many of the XL exhibitions. Jan Svankmajer’s Surviving Film (XL: 10) presented the collages from his latest stop-animation film Surviving Life, in which reality and dreams merge to create scenes that are both unnerving and humorous. A somewhat conflicting emotional response was likewise expressed in the exhibition Cruel to be Kind (XL: 16), which displayed the drawings and short films of the Russian animator Igor Kovalyov (perhaps better known for his work on the Simpsons, Rugrats and Aaahh!! Real Monsters). The various short films, which spanned a period of more than twenty years, featured his distinctive stocky figures, grainy patina and natural or domestic settings. Despite the rather innocuous locations in which Kovalyov situates his stories, they are transformed into sites of seedy repute in the unfolding of his dystopian narratives, where simple human actions and relations (feeding a baby, kissing, salutary greetings) have an undeniably lurid character. Kovalyov’s exhibition also highlighted one of the recurring problems of the XL programme: the often unsuitable lighting in the presentation of film and video art within the white cube. Kovalyov’s drawings were hung on the walls of the same room in which the videos were displayed and, consequently, either the room was so flooded with light it was impossible to view the films, or the room was darkened to an extent that the particularities of the drawings became obscure. Considering the interdisciplinary nature of the programme, it is unfortunate (although perhaps not surprising, considering the enduring problems that the dialogue between art and cinema consistently presents) that curatorial issues of this nature were not resolved. (3)

Guillaume Paris’ exhibition Permanent Eternity (XL: 12) brought together the ‘permanent videos’ the artist has been making since 1994. The short scenes of these videos play in a continuous loop, locking the characters and objects into a paradox of static movement from which they will never be liberated. Of particular interest was the artist’s appropriation of characters or vignettes from Walt Disney classics, such as the owl from Sleeping Beauty in Minding (1994) or Pinocchio in Fountain (1994) and Out of the Whale (2008). Dislocated from their narrative structure, the familiarity of these fairytale characters took on an uncanny aspect, the hope suggested by the original stories transformed into a moribund despair.

David Blair took the spectator on a historical journey to the discovery of telepathic cinema in the all-encompassing work Movietalkers of the Manchurian Telepathic Cinema (XL: 11). Described by Carels as a ‘living Wikipedia of media archaeology’, Blair created an environment reminiscent of the history museum, presenting documentaries about Manchuria , computer-animated reconstructions of the Lost Movie, discursive texts, paintings and artefacts. (4) By displaying information about the visual culture of a fictional tribe within a framework typically reserved for the presentation of so-called fact, Blair highlights a tension particular to the fairytale narrative, namely the oscillation between fantasy and reality. Despite the fantastic nature of fairytales, many of their elements are often steeped in human reality. For example, in Hansel and Gretel the family unit and its associated human dramas sets the scene for the unfolding of a narrative revolving around a candy house, an evil witch and found treasure.  

3. See in particular Adrian Martin, ‘La luz imperfecta: el cine y la galería’, Secuencias, no. 32 (July 2011), pp. 89-106.

Guillaume Paris, Out of the Whale, 2008, real time evolving permanent video, HD plasma screen, computer, colour, silent.

Departing from the darkness of these fairytale-inspired works, and reconnecting with Carels’ Not Kidding, was Abner Preis’ solo exhibition The Adventures of the The Great Abnerio (XL: 22) at the Showroom MAMA. More than an installation, Preis created an entire world of childlike enchantment that recounted the stories and adventures of Abnerio – a strong man in his own travelling show. Upon entering the space, visitors were instructed, by a set of rules, to: smile, take off their shoes, walk on the clouds rather than the ice floor, be nice to the animals, have fun and play. And one couldn’t help but play, listening to stories like ‘The Wishing Well’ and ‘The Travelling Turtle’ while surrounded by soft toys whose faces were garishly refashioned by thick paint into clowns, and fooling around on the merry-go-round. Surrounded by texts such as ‘love more, live more’, the experience of Preis’ world was like rediscovering the uninhibited freedom of childhood.

Abner Preis, Showroom mama Abnerio, from The Adventures of The Great Abnerio, 2010, mixed medium.

Personal Experience and Collective Memory

The representation or chronicling of personal and intimate narratives was another recurrent trend throughout the XL programme. Not too surprising in a world that, today, is obsessed with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – domains in which sharing our random thoughts, photos and relationship status has become almost second nature. However, this underlying presence of the personal was more than the skin-deep communication associated with social networking sites. Spectators were taken to the inner workings of consciousness in Peggy Ahwesh’s The Ape of Nature (XL: 9), where actors were filmed under hypnosis; into the private stories of home movies at the event Home Sweet Home Movie (XL: 13) in the Antonius Binnenweg nursing home; and offered glimpses into the lives of eight-year-old children in Johan Kramer’s filmic portraits Farewell Super8 film! (XL: 18). What is notable about these films and events is the way in which they transcend, in a variety of media forms and cinematic approaches, the particularities of individual identity, functioning instead as a witness to collective memories, resonating with ideas or emotions of a more universal nature: the human unconscious, post-industrial malady, nostalgia, longing, youth and loss.

This transformation of the personal story into an exposé of universal significance was executed to stunning effect in The Final Countdown (XL: 1) by Koen Theys. Theys collected over 2000 YouTube video clips in which individuals or groups, bands or orchestras, reality TV contestants or entire stadiums, render the first bars of the chart-topping song ‘The Final Countdown’ by Europe. Collaging these vignettes into a continuous loop of the opening notes, Theys turns what could have been a monotonous homage to ‘80s kitsch rock into a stunning and joyful crescendo of a famous riff. After the opening shots, which rather comically show the first notes being played on pint-sized instruments associated with child’s play, Theys takes us on a journey across different continents and demographics, offering glimpses into people’s lounge rooms, the rock-star fantasies of teenage boys, the self-conscious styling of a young woman and even the thumping bass of a rave party. The wide range of the performances is not only revealing of the song’s worldwide popularity, but also a fascinating anthropological account of the contemporary human condition, exposing underlying similarities despite differences in age, gender or race. While the bravado and exhibitionism of the people is clearly apparent, Theys’ work also functioned as a mirror reflecting our own concomitant (perhaps guilty?) voyeurism. It is not just that our generation wants to share; we also want to glance into people’s dreams, laugh at their failures or cringe at their humiliation. Ultimately, however, Theys’ work does not seek to pass judgement; there is no moralistic undertone, rather it is a memoralisation of our desire to perform for an audience.

Koen Theys, video stills from The Final Countdown, 2010, video installation for three projectors, 3 X DV PAL + 48'46" color – stereo.

In and Out of Site/Cite/Sight

For Carels, a guiding principle in compiling the XL programme was the relationship between a work of art, or film, and its site; the idea that locations outside the traditional exhibition space of the white cube/black box could provide an illuminating exhibition framework that enhanced the meaning of the work and the experience of the viewer. It was, for me, one of the most innovative aspects of the entire festival, producing some highly evocative results: opening up new spaces for experimental media and re-mapping the boundaries of the exhibition space.

The artist-filmmaker Leslie Thornton was personally invited by Carels to participate in the XL programme, and the correlation between the site (Natural History Museum) and her work (in which the source imagery was predominantly derived from photographs of dead animals) revealed a highly cohesive curatorial process. (7) Thornton’s series of monitor works entitled (((((Binoculars))))) (XL: 19) displayed two symmetrical circles, onto which were projected contrasting images; one representative, presenting close-up views of animals, such as antelope horns, the steely eye of a crocodile or the discarded skin of a snake; and the other abstract, which rendered a kaleidoscopic effect of the corresponding animal image. The binocular view was overlaid with the shadowy forms of visitors to various natural history museums, their chitchat intermingling with a haunting, sci-fi soundscape. I was told that, before viewing Thornton’s work, I should first visit the permanent displays and dioramas of the museum. Although unwillingly following the advice (I must admit that I am not a fan of taxidermy creatures or miniature models displaying the imagined life of dinosaurs), it did indeed provide the best context through which to approach Thornton’s work. The conscious framing of (((((Binoculars))))) within Rotterdam’s Natural History Museum positioned the viewer of her work not only as a spectator but also as the subject, creating a platform for the examination of our own viewing practices.

Leslie Thornton, film still from (((((Binoculars)))))), video installation, 2010, 9 minutes, colour, HD video

Another successful marriage between work and exhibition location was Hans op de Beeck’s film Sea of Tranquillity (XL: 27) screened in the Rotterdam Maritime Museum. The site not only reflected the maritime subject matter of Beeck’s film, but the journey taken to arrive at the screening room — which took you from the grand foyer, up a series of nondescript stairs and into the enveloping darkness of the screening room — was itself a poetic extension of the journey described by Beeck. His film took the viewer on a night-time tour of a mythical, haunting cruise ship, from the mechanical workings of the engine room to the operating table of a surgery. Combining live action and computer-generated imagery, Beeck creates hyperreal images, where a sense of something sinister, or quasi-surreal, insistently lurks beneath the photo-realist perfectionism of the exterior. We are shown the carnivalesque dancers of a theatre show, a lone diner sitting down to eat a pâté of blue jelly, and the sensual performance of a cabaret singer. The film evokes what amounts to the superfluous nature of today’s cruise liner, where the principles of leisure and entertainment take precedence over any requirement of travel – thus offering an inadvertent echo of a key plank in Rotterdam’s cinema programming this year, Godard’s Film Socialism (2010).

Although this form of site/cite programming was, for the most part, successful, there were two notable exceptions: Juliana Borinski’s Liquid Crystal Displays at Huis Sonneveld (XL: 15), in which there was an absolute discord between her LCD projections displaying the process of crystallisation (and I’m not even going to begin to discuss the sheer banality of this work) and its location within the 1930s hypermodern home-turned-museum; and Werktank’s Statics + Reverse Blinking at Oogziekenhuis Rotterdam (XL: 26) where, despite a greater harmony between work (optical illusion) and site (optometrist), I had an incredibly frustrating experience with the receptionists insisting there was no video art and did I have an appointment and, if not, could I please make way for the next patient?

So, why out of sight? The absence of concerted publicity was perhaps one of the greatest downfalls of the programme. Despite the numbers and white flags stationed outside buildings that signalled each of the forty locations, the XL programme seemed more of an aside than an integral part of the film festival, sliding out of the mainstream cinema-goer’s view. Indeed, one of the most prevalent responses I heard from fellow festival goers, as I recounted the numerous XL exhibitions I had visited that day, was ‘I’ve seen none’, as if A City Symphony was a sort of watered down, faux-serious film programme hardly worthy of genuine ‘cinematic’ attention. I don’t wish to make an argument for viewing Carels’ programme based on the big names or films (though there were plenty: Thornton, Quays and Svankmajer, to name a few) that were present, but rather because it brought together film, time-based works, experimental media, architectural space, paintings and drawings to propose new frameworks of viewing, new spaces for screening and new possibilities for a rapprochement between the at times hostile worlds of art and cinema. These ideas were also critically discussed in the two-day conference on artists’ filmmaking, Imagine an Audience held at the Piet Zwart Institute (XL: 3).

7. Leslie Thornton, interview with Cognac Wellerlane, Winkleman Gallery, New York (10 June 2011).

Although this form of site/cite programming was, for the most part, successful, there were two notable exceptions: Juliana Borinski’s Liquid Crystal Displays at Huis Sonneveld (XL: 15), in which there was an absolute discord between her LCD projections displaying the process of crystallisation (and I’m not even going to begin to discuss the sheer banality of this work) and its location within the 1930s hypermodern home-turned-museum; and Werktank’s Statics + Reverse Blinking at Oogziekenhuis Rotterdam (XL: 26) where, despite a greater harmony between work (optical illusion) and site (optometrist), I had an incredibly frustrating experience with the receptionists insisting there was no video art and did I have an appointment and, if not, could I please make way for the next patient?

So, why out of sight? The absence of concerted publicity was perhaps one of the greatest downfalls of the programme. Despite the numbers and white flags stationed outside buildings that signalled each of the forty locations, the XL programme seemed more of an aside than an integral part of the film festival, sliding out of the mainstream cinema-goer’s view. Indeed, one of the most prevalent responses I heard from fellow festival goers, as I recounted the numerous XL exhibitions I had visited that day, was ‘I’ve seen none’, as if A City Symphony was a sort of watered down, faux-serious film programme hardly worthy of genuine ‘cinematic’ attention. I don’t wish to make an argument for viewing Carels’ programme based on the big names or films (though there were plenty: Thornton, Quays and Svankmajer, to name a few) that were present, but rather because it brought together film, time-based works, experimental media, architectural space, paintings and drawings to propose new frameworks of viewing, new spaces for screening and new possibilities for a rapprochement between the at times hostile worlds of art and cinema. These ideas were also critically discussed in the two-day conference on artists’ filmmaking, Imagine an Audience held at the Piet Zwart Institute (XL: 3).

Critical Frameworks

One of the underlying trends of Carels’ programme was the presence of new media both as a form of source material and as the platform for the presentation of artistic films. Most memorable was, for me at least, Maki Ueda’s Palm Top Theatre (XL: 20) in which a selection of international artists produced 3D films for iPhones and iPads. The short films were, in themselves, relatively simple, dominated by moving computer graphics set to a soundtrack of digital music; nonetheless, they flagged a shift in the way we view film and art that was also addressed by Imagine an Audience.

Two of the more illuminating sections included ‘Giving It Away? – The Internet’ and the panel discussion ‘Limited Editions – Filmmaking for the Fine Art System’. Illuminating because the two sessions were essentially situated at the extremes of the divide defining the contemporary marketplace for art and film, between the absolute democratisation of art capital on the Internet and the enclosed ivory tower of the capitalist art system. On the one hand, speakers such as Tommy Pallotta (American filmmaker and producer), Paul Keller (one of the leading thinkers for Creative Commons in the Netherlands) and Bregjte van de Haak (documentary filmmaker) advocated the Internet as an alternative system for the financing, production and distribution of film, citing in support of this position numerous successful examples of crowd funding (which can be defined as the collective cooperation by people, usually on the Internet, who network resources and funds to finance enterprises led by other people and organisations), and the general ability to reach wider audiences. On the other hand, the Scottish avant-garde filmmaker Luke Fowler argued against the Internet, seeing the digital distribution of work as leading to a dislocation between the artist’s intent and the work. For Fowler, the explication of a work, especially that which explores new aesthetic languages, is essential; without the framework of the gallery and its associated pedagogy, the viewer is alienated.

For me, this latter view bears witness to an outmoded approach to art making and viewing, one that attempts to maintain the special status that a gallery automatically assigns to a piece of art or film. Without the privilege, indeed nobility, imposed by the gallery system, the artist is effectively faced with a whole new set of dynamics in the making and presenting of art; intimidating, certainly, but surely nothing to shy away from either.

In this regard, Michel Chevalier’s contribution was particularly insightful. In essence, he criticised the liberal market conditions of the art world because they impede accessible channels of distribution, and therefore maintain art as a bourgeois thing for bourgeois people. He discussed the emerging trends of filmmaking in the domain of the gallery, defining three positions: the theatre of sensibility (Matthew Barney), the Duchampian remix strategy (Pierre Huyghe) and Good Conscience Generators (Hito Steyerl, Chto Delat). For Chevalier, these modes are never really critical (the first two are accompanied by traditional art objects/commodities, effectively undermining the subversion of the ‘non-sellable’ art film), never really political and always couched in the safe rhetoric of neo-liberalism. What I find ultimately interesting about these various positions is their differing relationship to what Bourdieu refers to as cultural nobility. I think it is safe to say that with the increasing free accessibility to film and art, and, the gallery’s loss of traction in defining taste, we are at a juncture of how to define ourselves in relation to this so-called nobility. Perhaps the capitalist economic model of art will find yet another way to harness the potentialities of the Internet for its own end, or perhaps we will see a new form of art democratisation; either way, the discussions throughout this conference offered pertinent and topical frameworks from which to approach the film festival itself.

Blurring Boundaries: A Conclusion

If I had to describe XL: A City Symphony in two words, they would be: blurring boundaries. That is precisely what the set of exhibitions, events, locations and film screenings did. Refusing the safety that comes with well-defined categories, Carels’ programme explored the possibilities suggested by the crossovers between art and film, the liberation from medium specificity and the interconnectedness of art forms; it suggested novel means for arts and film patronage and opened up new public spaces for the presentation of art and film. Of course, not all sites were equally successful; in a way, however, this hardly matters, since it was refreshing (both figuratively and literally, the cold winds of Rotterdam’s port enough to dispel the most painful of hangovers) to get out of the white cube/black box.

from Issue 1: Histories